Sept. 9 (UPI) — As Britain’s new monarch, King Charles III gains a powerful new platform to advance his long record of environmental advocacy and spur action to fight the effects of climate change.
Charles has long been outspoken and active on a spate of environmental issues and has campaigned publicly for strong environmental actions. For example, he spoke at the COP26 United Nations climate change conference last November and said the world should be on a warlike footing to address the issue.
“Charles has demonstrated a very long-lasting and extremely deep knowledge of the impact of human activities on the environment,” Bob Ward, policy director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change, said, according to E&E News.
“In many ways, he has been ahead of politicians in his appreciation and concern for the issue.”
Charles also said at COP26 that humanity has run down the clock on climate change and now it needs a military-style campaign to mobilize the private sector in addition to government and international efforts.
“Global warming, climate change and the devastating loss of biodiversity are the greatest threats humanity has ever faced,” Charles cautioned in a video posted to the royal website two years ago.
Charles also launched the Sustainable Markets Initiative in 2020 — which has a mission to “build a coordinated global effort to enable the private sector to accelerate the transition to a sustainable future.”
“We’ve forgotten sometimes, I think, that we are part of nature,” he said in a video call to action for the initiative.
“So what we do to the world around us we are doing totally to ourselves. We can’t go on, I think, equivocating on this.”
Charles added that there needs to be a real “integrated global effort” to stop environmentally damaging human practices, and that we must never forget that the natural world is what allows humanity to continue.
“For our own survival, we desperately need the rest of the natural world, with which we are intimately interconnected,” Charles states on his royal website. “But which we have been taught to exploit and dominate as something separate from ourselves.”
In 2007, Charles received the 10th Anniversary Global Environmental Citizen Award by the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School.
The king has declared a national period of mourning in Britain to remember his mother, Queen Elizabeth II, who died at age 96 on Thursday. The period will last for seven days after the queen’s state funeral, which has not been set. Charles will officially ascend to the throne during a ceremonial event on Saturday.